“What’s it all about” is an introduction to us and the purpose and content of this web page.
Hi and welcome to our web page. We hope you enjoy your visit and return often to see or read new content as we add or delete.
This web page is all about our passions and convictions. Now as we are becoming long-in-the-tooth, it is time to share some of what we have learned and to provide a window into the activities with which we are engaged.
We started our journey together in 1978 in Edinburgh, Scotland in the urban design programme at the University of Edinburgh. Lou owned a flat on the Royal Mile and when I and my room-mates were evicted from a shared flat, she offered me a room. Long story short we hit it off and along with three boys, numerous dogs and various other critters we are still going strong. Currently we live in our third home at Springhill Farm, Ontario after Craigmore Farm outside Glasgow and the Old Shoppe, Lyne of Skene, Aberdeenshire where much was learned.
I grew up in Toronto, a very different place now compared to the 50’s and 60’s. Lou came from a small farm in Oxfordshire, also quite different today from yesteryear. Her passions and interests have grown over the years with ecology, forestry, farming and food security, reading and knitting among the more important pursuits. For my part, I have been converted from an urban boy into a rural man. Now we farm 90 acres with beef cattle, making hay, some grain, maple syrup, hops, a garden, firewood and making furniture all in the mix. Of course we both love and closely follow the interests and exploits of our three boys and their families.
As the coming months and years go by we intend to include in this web site aspects of our passions and interests in the hope a wider audience can find some benefit from and maybe be entertained with our musings. Much change is occurring in our world. It is not always easy or straight forward to make one’s choices and so by telling some of our story we intend to make good ideas and pitfalls more obvious.
To start, this web site is organized around two principle sections, musings blog and the perfect joint gallery including descriptions of furniture designed and made over the past almost forty years. Lou has been making short videos of local subjects of interest for ten years now and soon we hope to include some of them and of course any new ones she produces.
A quick word or three about musings blog as it will definitely be a work in progress. Much change is currently and will continue to happen over the next decades. Humanity has in many ways degraded environments around the world. There are many examples cited by authors in articles and books dating back into the early post second world war era. Reading them provides a litany of examples confirming what many predicted. Today our world is in the throes of coming to terms with the legacy of decades of misguided beliefs and actions. In this web site I will concentrate mostly on why and how we have arrived at the current state of affairs and where our convictions are leading us. Decisions in the 2020s decade will prove to be crucial for directions taken for the remainder of this century. I hope in a very small way to contribute to the nudging toward a consensus of sensitive and respectful decisions and actions as time for our world unfolds.
In a small way, with this web site, we hope you can enter into our world and join us on our journey. By removing some of the distance between us we can share and be better for all that.
Take care and we hope you enjoy our offering.
Steve & Louise